Use The Right Social Media For Your Crowdsourced Projects

Using social media can be a really creative, fun, and effective tool for crowdsourcing your company and your company’s projects. But using social media haphazardly can have disappointing results. What you want to do is target the right social media sites for your company in order to make your marketing as focused as possible.

Research is showing us that different social media sites are better at engaging different audiences in different ways. The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report in September showing just how powerful using social media can be for engagement – a key ingredient to effective crowdsourcing. One of the big takeaways from the report is how various social media sites garner different kinds of demographics. This is important information if you want your crowdsourcing projects to get feedback and input from your ideal customers.

Pinterest

One of the hottest social media sites on the market currently is Pinterest. For those who are unaware of this phenomenon, Pinterest is a site which has categories for everything from food to home and garden to style to design to humor. Virtually everything you could possibly want to know about has a section. And these sections contain “pins” or pictures of different things. These pictures can be “liked” or “repinned” (which is how they are spread from one user to many users).

Clicking on one of these pins leads you to the source site. In this way, Pinterest is a really helpful tool to crowdsource new people to your website because news of (and pictures of) products and projects are quickly and easily dispersed and send users directly to you. Take note though that Pinterest is dominated by a female population. This means that you would only want to focus attention on Pinterest if your customer demographic is also female. That is not to say that men do not also use Pinterest, but it is a much smaller margin.

Instagram

Instagram is the Twitter of pictures for smart phone users. Instagram users can follow other users and can be followed as well. Pictures can be “liked” and commented on. Through Instagram, news about and pictures of new projects (the before, during, and after) can be easily followed. People love to watch progress, and Instagram can be a useful tool in allowing your customer source to do so. It is also easy to share with others because users can see which pictures that the users they follow “like.” The Instagram users are mainly young adults. Keep that in mind when you are thinking about marketing groups.

Twitter

Twitter, and its cousin Facebook, are the most widely used social media sites. They are easy and mobile and allow for instant dispersal of information. Twitter allows you to send updates on progress of projects and projects as well as post pictures from Instagram on your Twitter account. People who follow your account also have an option of “retweeting” your tweets. In this way, people that follow them (who may not necessarily follow you) have the opportunity of seeing your tweets, and this may result in them following you as well.

Facebook

Facebook allows you to post updates, pictures, company information, and basically anything else you want to on the same page. It is widely used as well as highly varied in its capabilities. As far as informative goes, this is going to be the place that you can post the highest amount of information at one time. Also, you can make a page for yourself that people can “like” and follow, your followers may cause their friends to become followers, and following users can comment and like on various updates which are public and can cause a rise in crowdsourcing.

Tara Hornor has found her niche writing about marketing, advertising, branding, web and graphic design, and more. She is a writer for DesignCrowd.com, a crowdsourcing 2.0 marketplace on which thousands of graphic designers and graphic design studios from around the world provide their services for logos, websites, and print and graphic design projects. Follow @TaraHornor for more design and marketing advice.
http://creativecontentexperts.com

Add Your Comment

ben mccahill

Hi Tara! Any advice on which area to focus on – or are there channels which are best suited to a particular segment? There are a lot of social channels you mentioned, all excellent, but how do you prioritise?

Echo it

Hi Tara! What do you think of using Echo it? We are a Social Media website purposely designed for Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation.

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